Trapped
Story excerpt
Trapped. Trapped. She couldn't escape the word and now that it had started circulating in her mind it was gaining momentum and power with each orbit, adding to the already immense gravity of the central issue.
The caveats to this conclusion were slowly but consistently being pushed aside. Life had been exciting. Very exciting! And in a good way, not in a vapid way. Back before this comfortableness. This creeping normalcy that threatened to consume her identity completely. Turn her into something else. Something she definitely was not. Something she shouldn't be!
The long walks helped. At their apex there was almost enough distance to achieve a clarity of mind – a separation from the issue of the day that always obscured the heart of the unease – before she yo-yo'd back home and the fresh air, as always, began to grow stagnant and, potentially, poisonous.
When Charley ran out of sight that peace collapsed almost entirely. This rarely happened, but last time he had been out of sight this long, after she had unhooked his leash so he could charge ahead and back again, over and over, at his own manic pace, help had to be called before she could find him. Which meant an argument about letting him off leash in the first place. Which became an argument, carte blanche.
It was less than a minute before she started to sweat, jogging in heavy boots, her body having to ramp up from zero to "oh no oh no oh no," so quickly. She knew Charley too well. He had a privileged upbringing, almost always within barking distance of backup from, as far as he was concerned, the world's current and reigning apex predator. Squirrel, great dane, 9-point buck – he could take 'em, probably.
She had only spiraled a short jaunt into distress when she spotted him, wild and oblivious, growling at a boulder. Of course. Rock is suspicious. Rock must be watched carefully. Make sure rock knows it's being effectively herded with a few dominant growls and hops. Good, partner is here. See how I have this rock cornered! I did that, see. Okay I'll stand down a bit, you can get in there too. Hey! Careful. Don't let rock get too comfortable.
Whatever brought Charlie here had delivered his attention to the entrance of a split in the stone that disappeared back, like a miniature canyon into the face of the mountain. Extending all the way to the top of the boulder, which buried deep into the Earth, the fissure allowed light to spill down, revealing ancient history and modern influence, all at once. Stratification in the stone showed its age and how the outer edges had weathered the outside influences all on their own, protecting the ledger contained deeper in the crack, until one day, as always: people. At shoulder height it was obvious where the rock had smoothed, not by wind or water, but by passage from some oily, furless creatures with a tendency to touch things for no reason.
The combination of fear, chase, and discovery was euphoric. Her mind, for these precious moments, was completely immersed in the present, a glorious release from the omnipresent itch of anxiety. Before she knew it she was angling sideways. There was easily enough room at the entrance to skirt through without really touching the walls, but her hands were out to the sides anyway, gently working their way across the wall in front of her, following the smoothness of her predecessors. When she got to the first bend that would hide her from Charley's guard position outside the crack, he followed, unhappily.
She kept imagining that at some moment there would be a point of no return. A tight, perhaps irreversible squeeze. She would discover her curiosity had trapped her. Charley would have to channel Lassie, run back, go for help. If it got to that point they were both probably screwed. Charley could get lost on a sidewalk.
But the moment never came. In fact, after the initial curves, the passage widened. Between that and the clearly beaten dirt, she was now more cautious about running into Lester Ballard (thank you, book club, for inserting ostracized cave murderers as a potential possibility) than getting stuck. Fucking book club. If you told your fourteen-year-old self you'd be in a fucking book club, what the fuck. Now the inexplicable algorithm of consciousness was firing off, smashing thoughts together like a particle accelerator, this minor exploration gaining density and weight. As the fissure slowly closed at the top and grew wider at the bottom, creating a tunnel that grew increasingly dark, she pressed on as if she was blowing on the embers of her long diminished soul, willing them back to life with each step into the shadows.
I'm such an idiot. I'm such a fucking child, she thought, as she reached the end of the conclusion of her grand adventure, a cave, still dimly lit by the light from outside, the dirt and dust failing to hide the evidence. Frito bags. Cigarette butts. Beer cans smashed into inconsistent incubators for ants. Yeah, I walked less than two hours from my house and thought I'd discovered a cave system that hadn't been used by teenagers to smoke weed. A real Christopher Columbus over here. Ugh, I really need to learn some other explorers, that's gross, I'm Mexican, for fucks sake.
Charley, who only ever knew two emotions, had switched over to excitement, and was happily exploring both dirt and trash with equal enthusiasm, until he found the backpack. Bless his heart, he knew better than to rip into the still sealed bags of chips inside, but just barely. So he stared at them, willing his partner's attention towards the bags and keeping watchful vigil, should they somehow, by one of the many unknown forces that governed his world, spring open on their own.
Leaving snacks in a backpack for later in an area with wildlife seemed both too dumb and too smart for teenagers whose best smoke spot was at least an hour walk from the nearest high school. But she was still an explorer, and, determined to leave no trace, would not pull them open for Charley. Plus when he eats human food there's often a complicated clean up process that follows some hours later.
The strangeness was deeply compounded when she realized that, beneath the sharpie marks and scratches, there was something unfamiliar across the walls. Handprints. Or rather, the evidence that a hand once was there, a long time ago. Faded and inconsistent, but still visible once her eyes adjusted, the walls were frequently marked by circles of some sort of pigment, diffuse around the edges, more opaque towards the center of each mark, where there were sharper lines as the application of the color was blocked, presumably by the presence of a hand.
She pulled out her phone and threw more light against the walls. At the touch of her light, the marks seemed to grow brighter even than the more recent additions from the backpack kids. It seemed like there were no brushstrokes, or even lines. In fact the circles seemed to include the suggestion of a wrist and everything faded off gently at the edges. Like a hot breath on cold glass.
Her light slowly circled the space. The hands ranged in size, but they were all adult, best she could tell. And that they were, on average, probably shorter than she was. How cool was that! She could tell something about some ancient people by looking at their handprints in a cave teenagers use to smoke weed out of USB-charged vape pens. Someone, who knows how long ago, had made an actual mark on the world that was reaching out, bending the fabric of time, and impacting a life who knows how far in the future.
Near the backpack, towards the furthest, darkest corner of the cave, one of the circles absolutely shined in response to her light. The orange and red gradient was profuse and proud, a beacon standing above the other marks, modern or otherwise. It was just above the height of her shoulders, which meant she could get right up close to it with her light. Her eyes, despite an absolutely empty mental file where "ancient cave art creation techniques" would be, wanted to know what made this one different.
She was overcome by the urge to understand and, in service to that urge, to touch the stain. This was followed immediately by the warring impulse to preserve. Perhaps the middle.
Almost as soon as she had the thought she found her index finger delivering information to her brain as it made contact. Slightly cool. Dry. Absolutely solid. Definitely a rock. The scientific method prevails.
The negative space and the hand that had created it were bigger than hers, so it felt safe to extend her hand to the wall, carefully, making sure her fingers spread just so, avoiding the precious outline. Her shoulder and elbow straightened, closing the distance between her palm and the wall and suddenly every sense available to her mind exploded with new information.
After a moment of stupefaction, her brain managed to shove the sensory signals into some sort of queue for processing.
The wall was colder. Much colder. The air was too. This correlated with the goosebumps rising on her skin and even the sudden whistling of a fierce wind, now howling through the rock behind her. Her hand jerked from the wall and she whirled around. The light was completely different. It was much brighter, easier to see, and the warm hue of summer sunlight was gone. Charley was gone.
Action and intellect were happening simultaneously. She ran to the wall and slammed her hand back into position, less careful. There was no dramatic reversal.
"Charley!"
Her voice was swallowed by the wind. She began to back towards entrance of the cave, finally noting, distantly, that the backpack was gone. The trash was gone. The scribbles were gone. She stopped as she suddenly registered the deep color of the handprints all around her. No longer faded by age – they felt fresh and demanding. The entrance was absolutely covered, overlapping with marks from the ground to the very top edge, twice her height, reaching towards the crack as if the hands were splitting the stone themselves, holding it open. It felt immensely dangerous.
The light filtering through the tunnel flickered. She froze and her breathing slowed, an ancient survival instinct shoving it's way to the front of her mind. The light changed again. She backed up, slowly. Maybe it was Charley, but something extrasensory made her feel otherwise. She backed up further, crouching into the shadows at the far end of the cave, as something approached.
A shape crossed the light at the opening, outlining a tall figure. Her eyes dialed in, distinguishing layers and fur, likely a human-shaped frame underneath. For some reason her brain pointed out for her that there were in fact, two arms, two legs, and a head. Something emerged from the mass and she flinched, but it was just an arm moving slowly. A hand emerged. Fingers. A gesture that could not be misunderstood.
Come.